


To Cogitate and to Solve

by SapphoIsBurning



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV), Mathnet
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Characters Writing Fanfiction, F/F, Fic within a Fic, Pining, Stakeout
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 09:21:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7709584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SapphoIsBurning/pseuds/SapphoIsBurning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amy tries to explain fanfiction to Rosa while on a stakeout, but when she decides to reveal a very telling work of her own, it goes to an unintended destination.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Cogitate and to Solve

**Author's Note:**

  * For [psikeval](https://archiveofourown.org/users/psikeval/gifts).



> No knowledge of Mathnet is needed to understand this fic, but there is some explanation of the references in the end notes!

It was hour one hundred and seventy eight of the stakeout, and the two of them were starting to get a little loopy.

“Okay, so all slash is fanfic, but not all fanfiction is slash?”

“That’s basically right,” Amy said, rocking her head back and forth to work out the kinks from sitting in one position for too long. “People have started writing original fiction that basically uses slash tropes but...yeah let’s not complicate things.”

“And slash is two dudes.” Rosa frowned.

“Well, kind of? Femslash or ‘F slash F’” (Amy made quotes in the air with her fingers) “is what you’d call that. It’s less popular,” Amy said downwardly.

“That sucks,” Rosa snapped. “What’s wrong with people? I thought you said mostly chicks read this shit.”

Amy sighed. “Yeah, it’s true. I don’t know, it’s complicated. Smarter people than me have tried to figure it out and failed.”

That made Rosa grin a little out of the side of her mouth. “So you’re admitting there’s someone out there who’s smarter than you. Hah.”

Amy folded her arms. “I’ll have you know that fandom studies is a growing discipline with many emerging theories.”

Rosa took a swig out of an oversized water bottle. The building they were holed up in didn’t have running water, so the precinct put in a porta potty out back, and furnished their stakeout lair with provisions. They had already eaten all the Pringles. On the bright side, it was an abandoned building and Rosa didn’t mind, so Amy chain smoked for the first couple hours. Even that had gotten old quickly.

“So you just read this or do you write it?” Rosa asked, breaking the silence.

Amy dropped her lighter and knocked over a few empty Sprite cans. “Um.”

“Is that a sensitive subject?”

“Well, it can be. You see, what I write about is...hmm. What I mean to say is—”

“You write about people fucking,” Rosa said, staring Amy down. Amy went beet red.

“Yes. Yes I do. Sometimes.”

“Anyone I would have heard of?” Rosa asked casually.

“I have to go to the bathroom, I’ll be right back!” Amy stood and walked out.

Rosa rolled her eyes and went back to her game of Kwazy Kupcakes.

Meanwhile, Amy sat on the closed lid of the porta potty trying to breathe calmly. But she was in a plastic box full of stale urine, so deep breathing wasn’t really helping. She stepped outside. Unlocking her phone, she flipped open Safari and looked at her most viewed pages on archiveofourown.org.

It was her own fault, she thought, for bringing up the topic with her crush. But she just talked and talked when she was nervous and suddenly she found herself explaining what shipping wars were.

She tapped an icon to open the document she was currently working on.

***

_ Detective Ana Miércoles walked into the precinct, biting the inside of her cheek but holding her head high. She had every right to be here. Even though her division had fallen into disrepute in recent years due to lack of funding and poor STEM education opportunities for youth, she fought to rise to the top like a sphere with a low specific gravity. _

_ Miércoles waited in a conference room, pacing nervously, flipping through the files she had been provided with, and arranging what she could on the evidence board: crime scene photos, police reports, witness statements, a seemingly random pattern. But finding patterns was what detectives did, and Mathnet detectives did it with both precision and accuracy. _

_ The door slammed open, bouncing off the wall, and Miércoles jumped, dropping a box of pushpins on the floor. She looked up to see a tall, dark-haired woman with a scowling expression stomp into the room, letting the door snap shut behind her. She tossed her hair back and looked up at Miércoles. “Rosario Ibanez, homicide. I’m the detective in charge of this case. My sergeant made the call to bring you in, just so you know.” _

_ Miércoles took a deep breath. “It’s not my job to persuade you of anything, Ibanez,” she said. “That’s what the numbers are for.” _

_ “I hated calculus,” Ibanez said, narrowing her eyes. _

_ “Everyone always says that, but I really think it’s a problem of pedagogy, I mean it would be much better to have people take discrete algebra or number theory at that stage--” Miércoles cut herself off and looked up at Ibanez with wide eyes, like she had been caught doing something naughty, but Ibanez’s steely expression softened. They turned to the evidence board and contemplated it quietly. _

_ “It’s the bodies,” Detective Miércoles said, grabbing one of the crime scene photos and looking at it more closely. “First one stab wound, then one again, then two, then three. Do we have the latest report? I’ll bet you anything he’s been stabbed five times. I remember this from a case back in ‘88 that my mentor worked. It’s the Fibonacci sequence. It has to be.” _

_ Ibanez clapped a hand on Miércoles’s shoulder. “Maybe Sarge was right. Maybe there is strength in numbers.” _

_ *** _

Amy hit send on an e-mail, and then calmly (feigned calmly) walked back through the empty building to where Detective Diaz was waiting for her.

“Feeling better?” Rosa asked. “You did that nervous walk out thing. Sorry I asked about your fan fiction. That shit is personal. I got a cousin who’s real into The Sentinel, ever hear of that show? She showed me one of her zines one time.”

“Actually, I—” but Amy didn’t get to finish what she was saying, because they both turned to see the headlights of a van pull up in front of the building they were staking out.

Amy looked into the night vision binoculars on a tripod in front of her. “Got him, that’s Brayden Charles. Does that look like a hastily disguised bronze statue to you?” The suspect unloaded something bulky from the back of his vehicle.

“Busted,” Rosa said, snapping pictures rapidly. She radioed in to the station to inform them that they were going to proceed with making an arrest. They grabbed their gear and headed out.

***

_ “Life seems so meaningless, so random,” Miércoles whispered. _

_ “You taught me there is always meaning to be found if you know where to look,” Ibanez said fiercely. She stepped forward, reaching for Miércoles, and then she pressed a hard kiss to the other woman’s mouth. Their lips locked and tongues entwined as Ibanez pressed Miércoles against the cinderblock wall of the alley. _

***

The arrests were made and they brought the suspects in the Great Brooklyn Museum Robbery back to the station. Things happened rapidly: evidence to log and statements to be taken and suspects to be questioned. They did their work and went home, and the fanfiction conversation was left unfinished over two days of R&R they had both earned.

Amy avoided thinking about her crush by strenuously exercising, competing in her usual trivia league, and doing many Sudoku until she got up for work Monday morning.

She went into her e-mail to look and see if Rosa had responded. Before their big break in the stakeout, she had rucked up her courage and e-mailed Rosa a draft of her latest work in progress. It was an admittedly indulgent fic based on an old children’s educational show about math detectives. She had created a character—a blatant self-insert, if she had to be honest with herself—and was writing out her fantasies and making a lot of math references. It was a great way to blow off steam, but every love interest kept converging in similarity with her real-life crush. Maybe, she had thought, if she showed it to Rosa it could start something but maybe not and—

Her train of thought was interrupted when she looked carefully at her sent e-mail. She nearly dropped her phone.

“Fuck,” she said, racing out the door, hoping to beat Captain Holt to his desk.

***

“Rosa! We have to hack Captain Holt’s e-mail!”

Rosa glared at Amy. “Pass.”

“I meant to email you my fanfiction on the stakeout so you could read it but I accidentally hit the wrong contact and now we have to stop him from reading—”

“Santiago,” Captain Holt said, striding in the door of the bullpen behind her. “The manuscript you sent me was quite fascinating.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of papers held together with a binder clip. “I can only assume that you were looking for feedback.”

“Sure!” squeaked Amy.

“She’s a great writer, isn’t she sir?” Rosa said, clapping her on the back.

“You should get out of the habit of using two hyphens instead of an em-dash,” Holt said. “And I think you could have taken the slow burn nature of the romance even more slowly. But the payoff was satisfying, I have to say.” He handed her the papers, marked with his notes in red pen.

“Thank you?” Amy said.

Holt started to walk away toward his office, but stopped and turned back. “Can I expect a sequel?” he asked.

“That’s what everybody asks,” Amy sighed.

“I think we have more evidence to process,” Rosa said, gently taking the papers out of Amy’s hands and guiding her away from where Holt could dig the hole any further.

***

Rosa had to dash off to testify in court, so they didn’t see each other much the rest of the day. Rosa swung by her desk just as Amy was getting ready to leave.

“I couldn’t put it down,” Rosa said, handing over the manuscript of Amy’s story.

“I can’t believe Holt is my beta reader now,” Amy said.

“He’s firm, but fair.”

Amy gathered her things and they walked out together. When they were out of earshot and eyeshot of anyone else, Rosa stopped her.

“Was Detective Ibanez supposed to seem a little familiar?” she asked.

Amy gave her a sideways glance. “Maybe.

“Do you want to make out with me?” Rosa asked bluntly.

“I. It’s complicated. Making out is such a crude term,” Amy said, gesturing inarticulately with her hands.

“What’s a better term,” Rosa replied.

“Fuck.” Amy swore. “Well. Fuck. That’s a better term. I want to fuck you! Agh! Have I ruined our relationship?”

“Fuck no,” Rosa said. “Let’s fuck.” She put a hand around Amy’s waist and pulled her in close. Amy tilted her chin back and Rosa smiled like a shark as she bent in for a tight, sharp, fierce kiss that was only the beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> I wracked my brain for what fandom Amy would be writing in, and after trying a few, I think Mathnet OCs would be exactly nerdy and obscure enough for her (and now I want to write them for real). Mathnet is a segment of Square One TV based on Dragnet, except with math detectives. The female detectives on the show were called Kate Monday and Pat Tuesday, so her character is Ana Miércoles (Wednesday). There was an episode based on Fibonacci numbers but it was actually about a parrot and a hidden will, not murders. Unsurprisingly, I was a huge fan of that show too.


End file.
